Master of the Dark Side

A kindly father figure who befriends a pregnant lass, Felicia, then plots to kill her. An incest victim who exacts revenge after 14 sweet young children perish in a bus crash. A man who grieves his murdered daughter by frequenting the Exotica nightclub to leer at an erotic dancer dressed as a schoolgirl.

No, Atom Egoyan - the Canadian director who brought that haunting gallery of characters - is not afraid of the dark. While there is no predictable pattern to the stories told by this 44-year-old Oscar nominee and multiple Cannes winner, whom Wim Wenders called "one of the world's most outstanding directors," they share an unflinching clarity about the darkest, most mysterious nooks of the human psyche.

Exotica was an original screenplay, while The Sweet Hereafter and Felicia's Journey were adaptations of contemporary novels. Yet Egoyan has developed a trademark style in conveying psychological entrapment on screen. Scenes are claustrophobic, eerily shot at night and loaded with symbolism.

The Sweet Hereafter opens with a man trapped in a carwash. Physically and emotionally helpless, he argues through a tenuous cellphone connection with his drug-addled daughter thousands of miles away. Later on, an incestuous rendezvous between another man and his daughter takes place in a secluded barn at night. Egoyan's vivid use of contrast makes the horror hit even closer to the heart: Dozens of candles glow in the darkness, creating a lush romantic intimacy that is soon shattered.

In Felicia's Journey, domestic scenes are also cozy and warmly lit. A man putters happily about his kitchen preparing a sumptuous dinner. It is only when he nips into another room for more supplies that we begin to suspect all is not well in his home-nor in his mind. The film then flashes back to videotaped images of young women pleading for freedom, women whom, we correctly suspect, have not come to a happy end.

At first glance, Egoyan's latest film may appear a departure. Where the Truth Lies, which premiered in competition at Cannes in May and is schedule for a fall theatrical release, is the story of two entertainers at the top of their game in the fabulous 1950s. The sparkling duo of Lanny Morris and Vince Collins sings and charms its way into the optimistic hearts of Americans, in a tale that glitters with showbiz opulence. But this being an Egoyan film, all the Moët and Chandon in the world still doesn't add up to a particularly bubbly experience.

"It goes to some really dark places," Egoyan explained recently from a busy Toronto studio where he was immersed in post-production of a film he described as a "neo-noir."

Lanny and Vince, it turns out, share many secrets. Onstage, they can do no wrong. Off it, their transgressions are many: drug habits, mob connections, sexual peccadilloes. When a woman they are both bedding is found lifeless in the bathtub of their hotel suite, nothing is ever the same between the two. Though they both escape blame for her death, their comedy act collapses and the formerly inseparable partners stop speaking to each other.

Flash forward 20 years, when a fetching young journalist, Karen O'Connor, begins to write a book about the duo and its untimely, mysterious end. Hopping between L.A. and New York, she gets close to both Lanny and Vince, closer than she ever would have imagined and, not unlike Icarus, much too close for her own good.

"In our society," Egoyan said, "the celebrity is the closest thing we have to a god." What he found especially fascinating was the disconnect between the public and private lives of entertainers in an era when the absence of tabloid journalism as we know it made that divide much wider.

But it wasn't only the story that drew him to film Where the Truth Lies. He needed a diversion from the highly charged political aftermath of his last film, Ararat. Released in 2002, it was the first feature ever made about the Armenian genocide. It was a personal project for Egoyan and, while it received admiring reviews, it really was a departure for the man who was born in Cairo to Armenian parents and who emigrated to British Columbia when he was three. Egoyan says he considers himself fully assimilated, yet remains haunted by his ancestral roots, particularly the mass murder of more than a million Armenians in 1915, for which the Turkish government continues to deny responsibility.

He agreed to make a film about the genocide only after a public challenge issued by his longtime producer, Robert Lantos, head of Serendipity Point Films.

"I was an unintentional provocateur," Lantos explains about the impromptu suggestion he made in 1998 at an Armenian awards ceremony in Toronto where he was introducing Egoyan. "Everybody started cheering and applauding, and Atom had no choice but to agree to make this film." Still, even if this moment had not occurred, Lantos is convinced Ararat would have gotten made anyway. Avers Lantos, "It was a story Atom had to tell."

To do it, Egoyan went out on a limb, both artistically and politically. As a narrative device to convey myriad historical layers, his screenplay is a film within a film. Set in the present, it follows the on-set dilemmas of an Armenian director making a costume drama about the genocide. Flashbacks convey the horrific events of 1915. But some of the film's most compelling moments come in its contemporary settings, where Egoyan weaves in some of his favorite symbols. The ephemeral nature of the past is represented by a young man's need to capture images on film and video. Two-way mirrors in an airport and a custom officer's interrogation suggest an officially sanctioned voyeurism of our struggle for self-understanding.

Ararat was a complex, highly ambitious film, and opinion is still divided about whether it was an entirely successful one.

"I was surprised by how superficial all of the readings of Ararat were," Egoyan said. "I found the whole process of having to situate that film to be quite exhausting." It was during this period that an agent sent him a copy of Rupert Holmes's novel Where the Truth Lies while it was still in galley form.

"I took such pleasure in reading it," Egoyan remembered. Though this was Holmes' debut in fiction, the writer has extensive personal experience of the entertainment industry, having started off in showbiz in the 1970s as a composer and singer of story songs (remember "Escape," a.k.a. "The Piña Colada Song"?). Since then, he's been writing award-winning shows for both television and Broadway (Accomplice, The Mystery of Edwin Drood). "It was a world that I wouldn't have been able to come up with on my own," Egoyan said.

To boost the story's believability, the director needed two instantly recognizable stars as his leads, actors willing to use their own celebrity and subvert it. Kevin Bacon became Lanny Morris to Colin Firth's Vince Collins. Egoyan was drawn to the intersection of the actor's public images: Bacon's as a rock 'n' roll all-American, Firth's as a gentlemanly romantic lead.

"They both had to be prepared to take huge risks," Egoyan said. "They were both aware of what their status was, but they were both prepared to use that and even to challenge it."

Look back at credits of Egoyan's ten features and you'll see the same names over and over: cinematographer Paul Sarossy; composer Mychael Danna; actors Sarah Polley, Bruce Greenwood, Elias Koteas, Maury Chaykin and Arsinée Khanjian (who is also Egoyan's wife). That they come back year after year to explore the dark side of life with Egoyan speaks volumes about how compelling Egoyan's vision really is.

"Atom's intelligence made him absolutely fantastic to work with," Firth said about making Where the Truth Lies.

Alison Lohman, who plays the young journalist, echoed the praise. Initially, the 25-year-old had some trepidation about the extensive nudity and sex in the film, her first such experience.

"Nudity clauses were drawn up," she said in a set dairy, "the important stipulation being that my dressing room come supplied with a bottle of merlot. The ease of shooting in the nude is dependent upon one's director. In this regard, I could not have been luckier...Maybe I didn't need that bottle of wine after all!"

It's easy to see how Egoyan puts people at ease. Interviewing him, I got the sense of chatting with an amiable film prof. Terms like "narrative" and "discourse" peppered his comments. He took his time formulating answers, interrupted me politely when he hadn't quite finished a thought, and apologized when he felt he wasn't explaining clearly enough.

Though Egoyan's films have been reaching a wider audience over the past decade, some critics and viewers continue to peg him as an art-house auteur. Egoyan admitted he sometimes imagines easing up on the complexity of his work.

"I'm in awe of certain filmmakers who allow themselves to just react to something intuitively and impulsively," he said, giving Martin Scorsese, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach as examples. "Directors who are able to just trust their power of observation without a structural complexity. I'm very moved by that, but it's just not the way I construct things."

Says Lantos of his colleague, "He has an equal fascination with the two sides of the human experience, joy and tragedy. He can't make a film that doesn't encompass both. Because in order to experience redemption, you must first have the dark side."